RUTHFULLY YOURS

Some people commented that Hirsi Ali is turning against Wilders and ‘against the cause’ by focusing on ‘radical’ Islam, but I think it’s important to listen carefully to what she’s saying. She’s not saying Wilders is a racist or fascist, she’s saying his suggestions, such a banning the Koran, are impractical and that he’s a populist. Banning the Koran might be popular, hence ‘populist’, but in the Western world today, does anybody really think that banning a book is going to make people stop reading it?

And as I wrote in my previous article, I don’t think she’s suggesting anything he wouldn’t agree with. She’s pushing a very radical agenda. In fact, Hirsi Ali is calling to turn Islam into a faith-based religion.

In an interview on NOS she said Muslims don’t need to give up their faith. “Not praying, they may keep Ramadan and other spiritual sides of Islam.”

“The social-political side of Islam, they must give up, such as the subject of Jihad or introducing Sharia in any form ever in the Netherlands, the oppression of women, the intolerance against homosexuality, intolerance against people who were born Muslims but want something else. Those are issues that you must give up if you choose to live in the Netherlands.”

“And that is a choice. Immigration is a choice. Nobody forced them to come here. Everybody came here willingly.”
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Ayaan Hirsi Ali is proceeding in her new book with her campaign against radical Islam. She calls on the Church to wage a propaganda battle with Islam, which according to her doesn’t get much resistance. Americans underestimate the growth of Islam in their country. Europe is sleepwalking towards its downfall.

The Catholic church must enter the competition of systematic religious propaganda with Islam, to curb the growth of that religion. Saudi-Arabia invests millions in Koran schools and religious propaganda. Why should the Catholic Church, with all its financial options and millions of believers, not do the same? Westerners have looked on for too long while Muslim scholars won souls, says Hirsi Ali in her new book, Nomad.

In the book Ali describes how Islam is getting more and more established in the US and Europe and how this ideology clashes with Western ideals such as freedom and personal responsibility. Therefore she says it’s time for ‘opening Muslim thought, an enlightenment project.”

She urges Christians, humanists and feminists to improve the fate of Muslim women and fight the radicalization of the youth. “It’s maybe paradoxical to call in the church, while advocates of the enlightenment always fought the Vatican, but Christianity has changed and the Church has become a much more tolerant institution,” writes Hirsi Ali.

Without enlightenment, she says, immigrants will never adopt Western values and norms and would continue to see the oppression of women and domestic violence as normal. The 40-year-old Somali grew up in a tribal society. In 1992 she got asylum in the Netherlands, and in 2003 she became a parliament member for the VVD.

Since 2006 she’s been working for the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank in Washington, and attract[ing a] full hall with her lectures in the US. In those she speaks of her view of Islam, the belief in which she was raised but which she swore off in 2002. She described her youth and her arrival as an asylum seekers [sic] in the Netherlands in her international bestseller “Infidel” [in Dutch named ‘My freedom’]. In her newest book, Nomad, she again weaves her political message with her own experiences and observations in Europe and the US. In both continents she’s met much naivety regarding Islam.

She says Americans don’t know enough about Muslims in their country. Again and again she’s got shocked responses when she says in her lectures that customs such as marrying off, FGM and honor murder happen also in the US. Hirsi Ali says that Americans see radical Islam as a foreign policy topic. They don’t understand that it’s taken root also at home.

It’s unclear how many Muslims live in the US. Estimates vary from 2 to 8 million. Surveys show that more than half of the Muslims in the US see themselves as Muslims first and only then as Americans. Suicide attacks in order to protect Islam are justified by a quarter of young Muslims.

Immigration from Muslim countries to the US is increasing, as is the financing of mosques in the US by Saudi Arabia. Through this mission work, Hirsi Ali says, Muslims in the US are becoming more and more dogmatic. She claims that the radicalization is still at an early stage. The first American Muslims are going for Jihad training abroad.

The attack by an army psychiatrist, a Muslim born in the US, at an army base in Texas in the fall of 2009 is according to Hirsi Ali the proof that Islamic martyrdom has reached America too.

She’s pessimistic about the US. She blames the Church of passivity. “Europe is sleepwalking towards its downfall; a cultural, ideological and political downfall; because the church authorities neglected the ghettos with the immigrants.”

She says that churches could be active in Muslim communities and offer there the same services that radical Muslims now do, by building Catholic schools, hospitals and civic centers and from there do the same civilizing work they did in Africa during the colonization period.

She says the West is losing the propaganda war and the Church can help Muslims assimilate. She says motivating immigrants to adopt Western values has been neglected for too long. “European leaders – including church leaders – have for decades neglected to take the newcomers into their flock.”

In her book Hirsi Ali taunts Tariq Ramadan, whose book ‘In the Footsteps of the Prophet’ she describes as ‘poorly written conversion literature,” and says that from Oxford he operates his program of medieval brainwashing to the rest of the world.

Hirsi Ali also reveals that Rita Verdonk had asked for her support in her battle against Mark Rutte for the leadership of the VVD. But Hirsi Ali didn’t think either of them should be the leader, but rather Henk Kamp. Since she refused to support Verdonk, Verdonk later took revenge on her by taking away her passport in 2006, an affair that led to the fall of the third Balkenende government.